Texture tutorials

Post your texturing tutorial links here

Here's is a very useful tutorial on how to make textures, especially for hard surface texturing. Suitable for Xonotic and also very elegant and straight to the point. I'd suggest this tutorial to anyone who plans on making textures for non-oganic stuff.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=373024

I don't have any links, but I'll tell you quickly in which way I made the few unique textures to stormkeep2.

You'll need:
- The GIMP
- Resynthesizer plugin for The GIMP
- Normalmap plugin for The GIMP

This procedure works best on surfaces that don't have a special order in structure of sorts. For instance grass, rock, metal, wood etc. It's harder on brick walls, tile floors and such, as the resynthesizer plugin does not really pay attention to the overall structure (I guess there's some way, but haven't quite figured out yet).

So, start out with a photo, open it up in GIMP. Select the area you'd like to create a texture of, make sure the selection is a square (iirc hold shift while dragging). Next, scale down to a power of 2 (eg. 512x512, 1024x1024) and using the rectangle select tool, select about 10% of the lower area of the picture and 10% from the right area of the picture (do the second selection by holding shift+click). You should now be left with a rectangle/square of unselected area in the upper left part of the picture. This part will be used by the resynthesizer plugin to copy pixels off into the areas you have selected, so if you want to preserve some interesting areas in your selection, simply unselect them (ctrl+mouse). Make sure though that areas near the edges are selected, to make tiling look good.

When you are done so far, find the resynthesizer plugin from the Map -> menu (iirc). Make sure you have ticked tile both horizontally and vertically, and hit ok. Now it's time to go get a cup of coffee if your texture is of a big resolution, as this tends to take some time When it's done, you should now have a quite good looking tiling texture, if it was a texture that works good with resynthesizer If not, you'll need to do manual adjustments (with the clone tool etc).

Save that texture somewhere, as .tga for now, say texturename.tga. After saving, use the normalmap plugin to generate a normalmap for the texture, if needed. The result is obviously not always good, as it has no 3D data to analyze. Nevertheless, if you're happy with the result and deem it's worth to have your map use up some more resources with this normalmap, save it as texturename_norm.tga. Make sure the normalmap is correct by launching a rocket next to the texture in the game, using the console command g_balance_rocketlauncher_startspeed 0 first to freeze it in midair, while still allowing you to walk around and observe the texture. Look closely at which parts of the texture are lit, and which are not lit by the rocket dynamic light. If it's the wrong way (rocket on left side of a bump, darkness on left side of bump, lit on right side of bump) it means you have got the normalmap flipped the wrong way, which can iirc be corrected by inverting the red color channel of the normalmap in GIMP. Same thing goes for up/down, but there it's the green channel iirc.

Here's a collection of some more texturing tutorials with tips and advice on how to approach texturing.

http://www.cgtextures.com/content.php?action=tutorials

All are very good and useful but I'd like to point out a rather important one on how to make better normal maps from regular 2d images. The tutorial is for photoshop but it works with GIMP and its normal map plugin as well.

http://www.cgtextures.com/content.php?ac...=normalmap

Good stuff Lamoot

heres a shader out of vectorwars...
//============================================
textures/metal/panel50
{
qer_editorimage textures/metal/panel50.tga
{
map textures/metal/panel50.tga
blendfunc blend
}
dpreflectcube textures/cubemaps/spekkie
{
map $lightmap
blendfunc add
tcGen lightmap
}
}
//============================================

make sure in data/textures/metal you have 3 tga images...

panel50.tga = the color map

panel50_norm.tga = the normal map

panel50_reflect.tga = the parts of the textures that are reflective and therfore cubemapped the brighter the pixels, the more reflective and the darker the less reflective... think about it as a gloss map on acid

now you need something to reflect... so lets make a cubemap...

load any map and type in
envmap spekkie 512

it will generate a whole bunch of files (a cubemap) and save them as tga files in .nexuiz/data/env so go there and cut all the tga files that start with the name spekkie and then

paste them into the directory textures/cubemaps/

now make a testbox, apply the texture and your good to go.

let me know if you have any problems

Not exactly a tutorial, but still. http://www.burningwell.org/ is a collection of images released as public domain. You won't find any sci-fi panels there but you will find useful photos to help you add that additional touch to your Xonotic textures.

I have a hard surface texturing tutorial for GIMP/3dsmax

http://oblivion.ws/HowtoUnwrapandTextureaBox

It's a bit dated as I now use other techniques. But still helpful to the beginner.

..Nice tutorial, thanks for sharing.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=373024

try this: http://www.filterforge.com/

try this: http://www.filterforge.com/

i like mapzone better but thanks

mapzone website

yeah but mapzone is only for windows, (if i'm right)

yeah but mapzone is only for windows, (if i'm right)

unlike filterforge, mapzone works on linux under wine

unlike mapzone, filterforge works on mac or does it?

HEH

http://wp.me/ps72g-8R

Ben Simond's tips on texturing with Gimp.

http://wp.me/ps72g-8R

Ben Simond's tips on texturing with Gimp.

brilliant tips there! thank you!

http://wp.me/ps72g-8R

Ben Simond's tips on texturing with Gimp.

brilliant tips there! thank you!

Thanks going to Ben Simond Those are really good indeed.

I found some amazing tutorials by Philipk, he even shares the .psd files, which is very helpful.
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials.html

unlike mapzone, filterforge works on mac or does it?

Well I can tell you from experience the the demo does, not sure about the full version.

heres a new one:
Creating A Sci-Fi Panel #1,2

I found two quite interesting tutorials, one with Gimp, another one using photoshop. They might be intresting for some post-work on skyboxes (or even for work on new ones), if someone is able to create them in an image-manipulator.

http://www.scottphotographics.com/creati...s-in-gimp/

http://www.designshard.com/video-tutoria...ce-scenes/

Amazing! The second tutorial is a very professional one. Why thank you!

http://aerotwist.com/tutorials/create-yo...ment-maps/

... cubemaps ...